The Week in Politics – March 10

Keeping Up With Politics Can Be Tough, So We’re Here to Help

Since Trump’s inauguration, it has been more difficult than usual to keep up with politics. So we decided that a weekly column summarizing what happened during the week was in order. We’ll follow all the stories and then bring the week’s events to you in condensed form. So without further ado, here it is, the week in politics:

ACA Replacement Plan

Republicans revealed their plan to replace the ACA (Obamacare). There has been a lot of public outcry to the new health care plan, but Republicans don’t seem to care much about the opinions of the American people and rammed it through the House Ways and Means Committee at 4:30 AM yesterday.

The biggest losers under the change would be older Americans with low incomes who live in high-cost areas. Those are the people who benefited most from Obamacare.

For some people, the new tax credit system will be more generous. The winners are likely to be younger, earn higher incomes and live in areas where the cost of health insurance is low. (NY Times)

Representative Dr. Roger Marshall (R-KS), father of the dabbing teen that posed with Paul Ryan, angered many when he said:

Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us.’ There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves. (Daily Kos)

Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) angered even more people when he defended the plan by saying:

Meanwhile, Trump’s defense of the ACA repeal bill made things as clear as mud:

This will be a plan where you can choose your doctor, and this will be a plan where you can choose your plan. And you know what the plan is. This is the plan. It’s a complicated process, but actually it’s very simple, it’s called good health care.

Wikileaks Leaked Again

Wikileaks Leaked Again

In what appears to be the largest leak of C.I.A documents in history, WikiLeaks released on Tuesday thousands of pages describing sophisticated software tools and techniques used by the agency to break into smartphones, computers and even Internet-connected televisions. (New York Times)

I’d like to bring attention to the timing of this leak. Just when the Russian investigation pressure on Trump and his cronies was getting such that Trump and others in his social circle start acting out, Wikileaks releases a treasure trove of documents. Coincidence? I think not. I personally suspect that Wikileaks was trying to divert attention from the Russian investigation.

I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.

Et tu, Obama?

Clearly, Mar-a-Lago was not able to do it’s usual job of soothing the savage beast, as Saturday started off bright and early with Trump tweeting that President Obama had tapped his wires in Trump Tower before the election. There has been no proof presented to support this claim and many writers have suggested that this was actually an attempt by Trump to distract Americans from the Jeff Sessions fiasco.

Asian Troubles

Asian Troubles

With everything else that has been going on, it would be easy to overlook Asia right now, but there is some scary stuff going on in Asia these days. Stuff that could easily lead to war between the U.S. and Korea or China or both.

North Korea launched four ballistic missiles toward Japan and boasted they were a dry run for attacking American troops there; the US began the deployment of a controversial anti-ballistic missile system in South Korea despite furious pushback from a very unhappy China; and North Korea temporarily banned all Malaysian citizens from leaving the country in a dramatic escalation of a diplomatic spat with one of its few allies in the world.(Vox)

Ben Carson, Say What?

Ben Carson, Say What?

Trump’s behavior was so audacious this week, we really didn’t have time to pay much attention to his cabinet members. But then Ben Carson incredible:

There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land. (Ben Carson)

Did he just compare slaves to immigrants? Why yes, he did. Then it came out that President Obama also compared slaves to immigrants. Both Carson and Obama are black, so I honestly don’t know what to think about this. It seems to me that the phrase “immigrants” trivializes the many atrocities that were committed against Africans who were violently removed from their homeland, ripped away from their families, transported in horrific conditions, and forced into slavery.